CBSE Class 11 Psychology

Revision Notes
Chapter 5: Sensory, Attentional and Perceptual Processes

Knowledge of our internal and external world becomes possible with the help of
senses. Five of them are external senses, and two are internal senses. The sense
organs receive various stimuli and send them in the form of neural impulses to
specialised areas of brain for interpretation.
Vision and audition are the two most widely used senses. Rods and cones are the
receptors for vision. Rods function in low intensities of light, whereas cones function
at high intensities of light. They are responsible for achromatic and chromatic vision,
respectively.
Light and dark adaptations are two interesting phenomena of the visual system. Hue,
saturation and brightness are the basic dimensions of colour.
Sound serves as stimulus for auditory sensations. Loudness, pitch, and timbre are the
properties of sound. Organ of corti located in the basilar membrane is the chief organ
of hearing.
Attention is a process through which we select certain information by filtering out
many others that appear to be irrelevant at a given moment of time. Activation,
concentration, and search are important properties of attention.
Selective and sustained attention are two major types of attention. Divided attention
is evident in the case of highly practiced tasks in which there is much automaticity of
information processing.
The span of attention is the magical number of seven plus and minus two.
Perception refers to the processes of interpretation and informed construction of the
information received from sensory organs. Human beings perceive their world in
terms of their motivations, expectations, cognitive styles, and cultural background. •
Form perception refers to the perception of a visual field set off from rest of the field
by visible contours. The most primitive form of organisation takes place in the form of
figure-ground segregation.
Gestalt psychologists have identified several principles that determine our perceptual
organisations.

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The image of an object projected on to the retina is two dimensional. Three
dimensional perception is a psychological process that depends on correct utilisation
of certain monocular and binocular cues.
Perceptual constancies refer to invariance of our perceptions of an object seen from
any position and in any intensity of light. There is good evidence for size, shape, and
brightness Constance.
Illusions are the examples of nonveridical perceptions. They refer to misperceptions
resulting from misinterpretation of information received by our sensory organs.
Some illusions are universal, while others are more personal and culture-specific.
Socio-cultural factors play an important role in our perceptions by generating
differential familiarity with and salience of stimuli as well as certain habits of
perceptual inference among people.

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